Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition

I played the original XC for 80 hours and I loved the music, environments, and story, but I got tired of the combat and gave up on the game when I got stuck on a late-game boss. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the combat more if I'd done more to mix up my playstyle and if I'd actually bothered with the crystal crafting thing, but I didn't really understand the latter and I struggled to do much with the combat other than playing as Shulk and back slashing everything. I think the game could have done more to teach these mechanics better. I feel I ought to give it another go at some point but I'm not sure if it will be worth buying again for me. I don't want to just continue from where I got to before because I've forgotten most of the story and what I was doing, but I'm not sure if I can stomach putting another 80+ hours into the thing. That said, the better graphics and additional features of the Switch version might make it more enjoyable. This is not something I've ever said before when considering double-dipping on a game, but I might buy it if it has some kind of assist feature or just better tutorials.

My favourite was probably the Nopon Village just because it felt so homely and the Nopons are so cute lol. I also remember liking Valak Mountain for the same kind of reasons as SKTTR said above, as well as Gaur Plain for its incredible music and its scope.

@Dezzy I personally adore how Colony 6's musical arrangement gradually transitions from tones of utter despair and hopelessness to one of joyous celebration.

I thought almost every area on the Bionis (besides Ether Mine) was great, but Valak Mountain was probably the most memorable locations to me. The beautiful music, atmospheric scenery, and ice physics made it a really fun area to traverse. The battle with Mumkhar was great, and I really liked the sidequest chain where you had to balance the ecosystem. Eryth Sea and Bionis' Leg are close runner-ups for me, though.

They're likely at least redoing the final parts of the game because of Xenoblade 2. We're finally getting Perfect Works, just over 20 years later instead of with Xenogears and Xenosaga.

I really do hope they nerf Agility (too overpowered in both buffing your accuracy and evasion) and buff Reyn and Sharla though. It is pretty easy for newcomers to think combat sucks/not as good because they only stick with Shulk/Reyn/Sharla for the entire game, which completely hamstrings DPS across the game and doesn't allow for more exciting combat. And while I still prefer X and 2 combat over vanilla 1, the right tweaks might put 1 over them.

Oh, and fix the rare item drop rates to actually be more bearable. Worst part of the game, the sidequests and Colony 6 reconstruction.

The one thing they could change and most people would be fine with it, is the sidequests. This has the worst sidequests of the 3 Xenoblade games. They're mostly just meaningless fetch quests.

Yes! That's an awesome touch. Colony 6 is my favourite town-building sidequest in any game. Really puts Tarrey Town in BotW to shame.

Sharla is still probably my favorite party member, so her getting buffed would be nice. I REALLY want to finish the game this time. My wii broke, and there were several games that I didn't finish until I got a Wii U (Skyward Sword and Elebits come to mind), but I just never could get back into Xenoblade for long periods of time, being too busy at the time. I made it all the way to the end of Makna Forest by the time I got the Switch, and just haven't gotten back to it. I still have no idea what the end of XC2 has to do with XC1 though, so that should prove rather interesting.

Are you saying that having finished XC2 or not having finished either of them?

One kind of random thing I hope they add is a bestiary, or at a checklist of unique monsters. One of my favorite things about Xenoblade Chronicles X was the enemy index; it was really neat to read up about all the wildlife on the planet. It would be really cool to get a feature like that added in the definitive edition. Plus, getting all 255 affinity coins was a pain without having a list of already-hunted unique monsters to check back through.

One thing I really hope they add is some evidence of the other human colonies that were supposed to exist. There were supposedly at least 9 colonies, yet we only see 2 of them.

It would be so easy for them to just add some old ruins tucked away in one of the corners on the Bionis Leg. I appreciate that kind of world building.

@Dezzy yeah I agree. I wondered about that too. They could easily write it off with a few lines here or there. Having people mention that, say, colony 2 failed because of X, Y and Z. Or something.

@Tsurii

We only go to one leg. Although I'm fairly sure it's implied that Colony 6 and 9 are the only ones left at the point of the game. So it would have to be that they WERE on the other leg, rather than ARE on the other leg.

Given that they're constantly under attack, there should be more human settlements hidden within the Bionis. There are all those different caves going through the inside, but they never think to really use it for protection.

@Dezzy Having finished XC2, yes. The whole end to that game was a little Gainax like having only gotten as far as the end of Riki's area in XC1. I have no idea who that old guy was or what he has to do with XC1.

Didn't get far in XC1 so the only connection I noticed between XC1 and XC2 (excluding challenge battle DLC) was hearing Shulk in one of the final chapter's cutscenes so I thought the other half of Klaus was in Shulk's world and what Shulk said was during the final battle of XC1.

Well it's probably best to avoid reading too much lore if you want to be surprised. None of it is crucial to understanding the main story, because they are both self-contained. It's more of a cool lore novelty more than anything else. Although it does fill in a few holes in the original Xenoblade story that didn't entirely make sense before XC2.

A shame I know, but never finished this one,
So now im gonna give it a shot again, people tell me this is the best ( for me its x) but hell yeah Im going to try it again.
It looks amazing from what we have seen

@StephanDLW

I think it added quite a bit:

I love all of your ideas,
MonadoBoy's bestiary
Dezzy's added lore, especially for the other colonies
StephanDLW's QoL improvements
and hopefully my suggestion of having more environmental zoom-outs to see and feel the world better are also part of the remake.

@StephanDLW I'm going to guess April 2020, that September Direct was really weird (extremely quiet about games after November). So I think a more normal Direct will come in November a day before Terry Bogard releases for Smash, we get an April 2020 release for Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition and some new games get the mysterious "2020" release window that'll act as our usual fall/holiday titles.

Yes! You can zoom the camera out so much further in XCX and XC2. They need to increase that here!

It was apparently started about 6 months ago. I would guess something like this would take a maximum of 18 months, so probably before this time next year (while it's a massive game, they did reuse a lot of assets in the game in order to get it running on the Wii). I'm gonna guess July/August.